invest in evil

It really is too soon for BP jokes; but once you get past the BP-cringing part, this Scott Adams article--arguing that the only wise investment strategy is to invest in companies you think are evil--is pretty funny.

Here's how he describes the alternative:

Invest in Companies You Love

Instead of investing in companies you hate, as I have suggested, perhaps you could invest in companies you love. I once hired professional money managers at Wells Fargo to do essentially that for me. As part of their service they promised to listen to the dopey-happy hallucinations of professional liars (CEOs) and be gullible on my behalf. The pros at Wells Fargo bought for my portfolio Enron, WorldCom, and a number of other much-loved companies that soon went out of business. For that, I hate Wells Fargo. But I sure wish I had bought stock in Wells Fargo at the time I hated them the most, because Wells Fargo itself performed great. See how this works?

Those crazies in the musiz biz. Crazy!!

In the article about Rick Rubin (who's a very pro-artist producer, now employed to help Columbia get on its feet) and apparently he and a lot of other music-ee guys (Jimmy Iovine, David Geffen) think a subscription system is the ONLY way to go. And if the music companies don't do it, then Microsoft will wait until the record companies are crashing and cheap, buy em up, and do it themselves.

Meanwhile Rubin's partner--the more businessee guy--is worried about all the problems with the subscription system (with reason). But his solution is... take a cut from the artists' touring and merchandise sales! What the--!!! So the record industry, who have been fucking over artists for decades, who survived for a decade by riding the CD wave (people buying albums they've bought before, and charging $22 per album when it cost pennies to make), now want to save their asses by taking a cut from the one area where artists make their living?? Oh come ON. Eeeeaaaaaase!

It doesn't even fix the problem, which is -- how can artists afford to record albums if their music is mostly downloaded? You have to fix the problem of how to pay for content creation. Not find a new way to bilk the content creators. Jeeze Louize!

One opinion I'm coming across with increasing frequency is the that digi-downloads is only ONE reason why the music industry has been losing money this past decade, and it's just masking a whole bunch of other reasons that the companies are themselves to blame for. Such as not concentrating enough on finding good content. The companies were the gatekeepers to the few avenues where people discovered new music, so if they had someone mediocre or shitty to sell, they could still sell them--get their videos out, get them airplay, etc. And it was (in part) because kids were looking for actual music they LIKED that the online avenue took off the way it did.

And I read of another set of authors who argue that all the media conglomerating that's been going on hasn't been good for the companies in question: "the authors point out the difference between judging a company by how many times it's CEO is seen in Sun Valley and by whether it generates consistently superior profitability." Sounds a bit like Icahn's comments.